QR Code Embroidery

Sometimes you have to roam far and wide only to find something interesting in your own neighborhood.  That happened to me this week. While surfing the World Wide Web, I discovered an intriguing piece of needlework in the collection of the Textile Museum in Tilburg, The Netherlands, almost in my backyard. 

What I stumbled upon is a set of  white linen napkins, each decorated with a red embroidered square. Have a look.  

At first glance the design looks a crossword puzzle matrix or even Asian calligraphy.  It's a QR code -- or full out a Quick Response code. It’s one of those things you  know what it is when you see it, but you may not know what it’s called.

A QR code is a pattern made of filled and empty blocks. The pattern functions like a bar code. It is intelligible to computers and many smart phones equipped with the appropriate software.   Just take a snap of the code and you can access the information hidden within. I’ve encoded my own message above.  Give it a go. 

My QR message: I love embroidery

The Textile Museum napkins were the diploma project of Willemijn van der Sloot, who graduated in 2011 from Amsterdam’s Gerrit Rietveld Academy.  It is the Dutch capital’s premier art college, renowned for fostering conceptual art. You have to admit it’s pretty impressive to have a national museum purchase your work the year you graduate from art school!  The project is more elaborate than it appears.

Van der Sloot’s QR code is precisely embroidered in what looks like long/short stitching. It represents a URL code. That’s a pointer to a video on YouTube which the artist made of an immaculately set table, decked with porcelain, crystal, flowers, silverware-- the whole nine yards.  I wondered about that ceremonial conceptualization of “home”.  Most contemporary Dutch families favour place mats and informal place setting, but I ‘m not going to quibble. The notion that the embroidered domestic textile points to a fuller exposition of an “idea” via a film held on the public internet is the essence of the project.

Explaining the idea behind her work van der Sloot, now a jewelry designer, believes that new media like Facebook and Twitter have created “a world parallel to the real world” in which privacy is being lost. She posts on her website:

 This new media sub-world can make that we lose our awareness of the real world. More and more we stay in this sub-world, created by our selves (sic) . Through my work, I want to achieve an inverse movement, using current new media technology, to bring the private back home.

I understand her sentiment.  Yes, the message in her QR code patterns, both in the napkins and again in a set of traditional Dutch kitchen towels, is unintelligible to me and is, therefore, private to her.

In the process she has created a very clever link between the Traditional, represented by thread, napkins and kitchen towels, and the Modern embodied by the QR code and the internet.   And there is that connection between home and stitching again that I wrote about in an earlier blog.!

What’s more, I certainly see the possibilities of using this QR concept as a way of creating embroidery projects that appeal to our contemporary youth’s preference for abstract or the techno-driven design.  

Also the tie between textile and technology surely offers some younger stitchers a new creative prospect, such as linking their work to websites or social media. This has the potential for making needlework more edgy and multi-faceted for those who are so inclined.

Embroiderers who like technical challenges might enjoy the precision required to create accurate machine- readable stitchery. One could use variegated thread, or multiple colors, within the solid sections of the QR pattern to create more visual interest for humans.  And one could experiment with different stitches to see what computer software could cope with.  Needlepoint, for example, might give good results.  Yes, the QR code idea definitely offers possibilities to experiment with.

So will QR patterns with their encoded messages catch on as standalone projects?  Are we looking at new genre in the making, like ”naughty needlework”?   Is this a modern twist on the messages in samplers?  Maybe, maybe not. There is a smidgen of gimmickry in all this, despite the possibilities. 

But then what do I know?  I am not a museum curator. Nor am I an art critic. I just stitch and roam the Web observing, through the eye of my embroidery needle, how the world relates to needlework and how that relationship is evolving by the day. So far, thread has not been left behind.